A Camera-Realistic Robotics Simulator for Cinematographic Purposes

A Camera-Realistic Robotics Simulator for Cinematographic Purposes

2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) October 25-29, 2020, Las Vegas, NV, USA (Virtual) CinemAirSim: A Camera-Realistic Robotics Simulator for Cinematographic Purposes Pablo Pueyo, Eric Cristofalo, Eduardo Montijano, and Mac Schwager Abstract— Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular in the film and entertainment industries, in part because of their maneuverability and perspectives they en- able. While there exists methods for controlling the position and orientation of the drones for visibility, other artistic elements of the filming process, such as focal blur, remain unexplored in the robotics community. The lack of cinematographic robotics solutions is partly due to the cost associated with the cameras and devices used in the filming industry, but also because state- of-the-art photo-realistic robotics simulators only utilize a full in-focus pinhole camera model which does not incorporate these desired artistic attributes. To overcome this, the main contribution of this work is to endow the well-known drone simulator, AirSim, with a cinematic camera as well as extend its API to control all of its parameters in real time, including various filming lenses and common cinematographic properties. Fig. 1. CinemAirSim allows to simulate a cinematic camera inside AirSim. In this paper, we detail the implementation of our AirSim Users can control lens parameters like the focal length, focus distance or modification, CinemAirSim, present examples that illustrate aperture, in real time. The figure shows a reproduction of a scene from “The the potential of the new tool, and highlight the new research Revenant”. We illustrate the filming drone (top left), the current camera opportunities that the use of cinematic cameras can bring to parameters (top right), the movie frame (bottom left) and simulated frame research in robotics and control. from the camera (bottom right). The supplementary video contains this scene and other experiments using the simulator. github.com/ppueyor/CinematicAirSim Finally, autonomous key frame selection during the filming I. INTRODUCTION is discussed in [9]. All these works are focused on the The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is wide- design of trajectories, i.e., sequences of desired positions and spread in industry and robotics research [1]. Among the orientations, of the drones for filming purposes. list of potential uses of UAVs, there is growing interest in Other works focus on the aesthetic and artistic issues the film industry for those seeking a more unique cinematic associated to photographic aspects. For example, [10] shows experience. Drones enable the recording of scenes and per- a system for aerial filming that is able to record scenes spectives that are typically inaccessible by typical filming following some cinematographic principles, while [11] uses cranes or other infrastructure. deep reinforcement learning to present an autonomous drone In the robotics community, there is interest in developing platform that is able to follow an actor while getting a control and planning algorithms for cinematographic pur- visually pleasant shot, based on aesthetic quality parameters. poses. For example, model predictive control is used in [2] However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no prior to calculate trajectories when filming a desired aerial shot. work that explores the control of the lens of the cameras to Different interfaces to generate paths according to artistic achieve better aesthetic and artistic outcomes associated to requests are presented in [3]–[5]. A high-level API that photographic aspects. This is probably due to the additional incorporates camera path planning and autonomous drone complications associated with modeling cinematographic control for shooting purposes is described in [6]. A 3D cameras, not to mention the expensive price of these sensors. tool that eases the shooting and the design of trajectories of Including cinematographic cameras in an existing robotics UAVs for non-robotic experts is developed in [7]. Visibility simulator could be a simple and cheap way to avoid these constraints, in terms of the focal length are discussed in [8]. complications (see our solution to this problem in Fig. 1). The research progress in robotics would be almost impos- This work was supported by a DGA scholarship and a NDSEG fellow- ship; Spanish projects PGC2018-098817-A-I00 (MINECO/FEDER), DGA sible without some software to virtually reproduce the robots T04-FSE; NSF grants CNS-1330008 and IIS-1646921; ONR grant N00014- as close to reality as possible. There are many examples of 18-1-2830 and ONRG-NICOP-grant N62909-19-1-2027; and the Ford- robotics simulators that have been used and improved for Stanford Alliance Program. P. Pueyo and E. Montijano are associated with the Instituto de In- decades. Stage and Gazebo [12] are two of the most popular vestigacion´ en Ingenier´ıa de Aragon,´ Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain state-of-the-art simulators, thanks to their native integration fppueyor, [email protected] with the Robotic Operating System (ROS). Webots [13] E. Cristofalo and M. Schwager are associated with the Depart- ment of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, USA is another interesting platform that includes a variety of fecristof, [email protected] robotic models and sensors and an advanced physics engine. 978-1-7281-6211-9/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE 1186 However, in order to account for the cinematographic aspects and the ability to create virtual environments make this tool of filming, it is also very important that simulators have a extremely appealing for research. powerful graphic engine capable of rendering photo-realistic Since the principal aim of the cinematographic simula- scenes. Despite the features that make these simulators useful tor presented in this paper is to enable robotics research for general robotics — their powerful physics engines, their with the ability to acquire artistic shots, the quality of the easy connection with ROS, or the wide community of users visualization is an important aspect in its development. In that makes development easier — the lack of realism in that sense, Unreal comes with a powerful graphics engine, their graphic engines limits their potential in the context of which has a high number of characteristics that will be cinematography. important to the aspirations of the simulator. In particular, it The last few years have witnessed the appearance of new is worth-mentioning the powerful rendering capabilities, the simulators that make use of state-of-the-art graphic engines, visualization during the execution of the play using multiple such as Unreal [14] or Unity [15]. On one hand, Flight- configurable cameras, and the high fidelity simulation of the Goggles [16] is a photo-realistic simulator able to render light, weather, and reflections of scene objects. realistic environments thanks to the Unity Engine, as well as In addition, the environment editor of Unreal offers wide its capability of gathering data and the integration of lifelike capabilities to create these realistic scenes. There are existing simulated sensors. On the other hand, AirSim [17], devel- tools that allow users to design environments that are very oped by Microsoft Research, is built upon Unreal Engine. close to reality in a quick and user-friendly way. There Both simulators meet all the necessary requirements for the also exists an extensive community of active users that are cinematographic purposes, but currently none of them offer creating 3D models and maps available to download for free. the possibility of online and real-time modification of camera All of this simplifies the task of creating custom scenarios parameters associated with standard filming photographic to the robotics researchers. Finally, Unreal comes with C++ effects, i.e., focal length, focus distance, and aperture. code that allows to move the elements, direct the cameras, or The main contribution of this paper is a modification of control the light sources of the scene in real time. Moreover, AirSim, CinemAirSim, that empowers the simulator with the there are some works that provide an easy integration of artistic possibilities of a real filming camera. The existing Unreal with ROS [18] and OpenCV [19]. AirSim API is extended with new methods that enable users to access and control a camera’s focal length, focal distance, B. AirSim or the lens aperture. Our contribution allows different types AirSim (Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform) was of lenses to be selected and considered in the control problem launched in 2017 [17] by Microsoft Research as a plugin by exploiting the potential of the Unreal Engine. All the files for the Unreal Engine 4. Like Unreal, AirSim also has an required to modify the original simulator can be downloaded extensive community of users that are actively improving and for free from the Github page of the project1. The paper also discussing potentially interesting features of the simulator. includes examples where the different parameters are ad- Moreover, the possibility of generating binaries of code that justed during the drone’s flight to mimic scenes from movies integrates all the elements (environments, configurations) in awarded with the Academy Award for Best Cinematography a ready-to-run file enables AirSim to be used with a specific in different years. purpose by those users that are not so familiar to the robotics The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II scope, such as cinematographers in the film industry. This is describes the two main software elements of the simulator, the method that Microsoft followed for the drone competition Airsim and Unreal. Section III gives all the details of the Game of Drones during NeurIPS 2019 [20]. integration of the cinematic camera into AirSim. Section IV AirSim provides a realistic simulation of a generic quadro- shows different examples using the simulator to control both tor and offers the possibility to customize it to accommodate the drone and the camera parameters in order to reproduce to different commercial models.

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